Tuesday 25 August 2009 09.28 EDT
First published on Tuesday 25 August 2009 09.28 EDT

If it weren't for Google, which has transformed its logo into a telescopic doodle to mark the occasion, the 400th anniversary of the first public demonstration of Galileo's revolutionary telescope might have gone unnoticed. How strange that the public – and the media – can be captivated by revolutionary ideas in science, such as evolution and relativity, but fail to be impressed by the invention of new scientific instruments, which have arguably been far more important for human progress.

In centuries to come will we mark the anniversary of the invention of X-ray crystallography, DNA sequencing, magnetic resonance imaging, the silicon chip?

In his book Imagined Worlds, which is next month's Guardian Science Book Club title, Freeman Dyson notes that in the past 500 years there have been only seven concept-driven revolutions in science, which will forever be associated with the names Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Maxwell, Freud, Einstein and Heisenberg. Over the same period, there have been 20 tool-driven revolutions, but none has captured the public imagination in quite the same way.

Dyson blames Thomas Kuhn and his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:

It misled a whole generation of students and historians of science into believing that all scientific revolutions are concept-driven. The concept-driven revolutions are the ones that attract the most attention and have the greatest impact on the public awareness of science, but in fact they are comparatively rare ... Two prime examples of tool-driven revolutions are the Galilean revolution resulting from the use of the telescope in astronomy, and the Crick-Watson revolution resulting from the use of X-ray diffraction to determine the structure of big molecules in biology.

Later in the book Dyson has fun speculating about future tool-driven revolutions, including "radioneurology" which would make telepathy possible. And he's perfectly serious:

There is no law of physics that declares such an observational tool to be impossible ... We need a technology that allows us to build and deploy large areas of small transmitters inside a living brain, just as integrated-circuit technology allows us to build large arrays of small transistors on a chip of silicon.

So let's hear it for the unsung heroes of human progress: the technicians and toolmakers. Galileo's telescope we remember, but what about Max von Laue (X-ray crystallography), Fred Sanger (DNA and protein sequencing), Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce (silicon chips)?